As a leading technology company, Cisco pushes the envelope in our traditional industries with innovative business transformations, as we did by entering the server market in 2009 with our Unified Computing System paired with our Nexus data center switching family. Competition in the marketplace is good for customers as competition accelerates innovation, creates new opportunities as old problems are attacked from new angles, and creates incentives for the various players in the industry to work together­–and separately–toward better solutions.

But achieving the promise of this progress and innovation comes with a necessary step that I feel is often overlooked, rushed, or ignored: Testing. At Cisco, we perform intense testing as we develop our solutions whether the testing is in-house, with partners and customers, or via third-parties.

Over 70 percent of leading cloud providers are using Cisco CloudVerse on their journey to the cloud, and–in the latest example of our commitment to testing–third-party testing firm EANTC has validated those cloud providers’ commitment by affirming “Cisco has all the components one would need to offer cloud services”. For coverage, Light Reading has published the first report of the Cloud Mega Test results done by EANTC.

But let’s talk more about what was behind the test.

I’ve heard from our customers that for them to succeed in the data center and cloud, we need to make their lives easier, more affordable, and more efficient. CloudVerse is our latest response to these pain-points and EANTC tested each of the three key elements to see if Cisco delivers on our promises. Within the Unified Data Center, a few of the tests investigated our automation capabilities including the ability to move VMs with LISP without needing to set up IP configuration while also preserving VM-level failover recovery mechanisms. Additional tests covered the Cisco CloudVerse security policies tied directly to the VM while keeping VMs completely isolated and secure. EANTC covered Cisco’s data center components for automatically configuring multiple tenants while proactively establishing quality-of-service management on a resilient cloud fabric with less overhead as well. To summarize the initial set of results, EANTC says that Cisco “has worked hard to merge the various server and network elements that typically exist in a data center in order to present a unified system to the market”. And we still get to look forward to the release of the results around the testing of Cisco’s Cloud Intelligent Network and Cloud Applications & Services.

What really excites me about these tests is their comprehensiveness: representing the full sweep of capabilities required to build out a cloud – not just a point product here or there.

The tests were created by Light Reading and EANTC around real-world customer care abouts including Security, Agility, Economics, and Experience. They completed 25 test segments across the 3 Cisco CloudVerse themes: Unified Data Center, Cloud Intelligent Network, and Cloud Applications and Services. To support the Light Reading/EANTC test, Cisco stepped to the table with 17 engineering business units, 80 engineers, and provided $75 million of equipment in the test including UCS servers, Nexus switches, CRS and ASRs, MDS, and ASA.

After six months of preparatory work and eight weeks of testing, I’m pleased with the outcome. I’m even happier to see how successful our customers have been deploying solutions with Cisco CloudVerse and how much having these reference tests will help them.

In the end, the results do speak for themselves. So please head over to Light Reading’s portal to check out the Cloud Mega Test and let us know your comments or questions.

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